O Idiota

Dostoevsky was director Kurosawa Akira's favorite author. According to Kurosawa, nobody could depict humanity better. Therefore Hakuchi (The Idiot, 1951) was a passion project for Kurosawa, which he executed as a four-hour magnum opus. As you might guess, movie studios are rarely interested in these sorts of passion projects...

The Idiot was Kurosawa's first film for Shochiku after Scandal (1950). When he delivered his four-hour cut, the studio decided "nope", and edited a 100 minute (!) version out of it. Kurosawa was furious, and didn't make another film for the studio for 40 years. During the filming of Hachi-gatsu no rapusodi (Rhapsody in August, 1991), the director tried to locate a full cut from the studio archives, but the four-hour cut is apparently lost forever. Thankfully what remains for us later audiences, is not the 100 minute briefing by Shochiku, but an edit that lasts almost three hours. As always, it's difficult to say what an extra hour could have added to the narrative. But one thing is sure. At least you would not need to read intertitles in a sound film!

I recently read the Dostoevsky novel and watched a Soviet film adaptation by director Ivan Pyrev (1958). Perhaps Pyrev had witnessed Kurosawa's infamous 100 minute cut, and thereafter decided to not be an "idiot" himself, and to instead do the film in parts. Pyrev's adaptation only tells book one, and he never got to make a sequel for it. I thought his film was okay. As for the book, it wasn't among my favorite things by Dostoevsky, whom I usually adore. I would recommend Kurosawa's film for anyone who happened to like the novel. If you haven't read it, you are going to be a little confused. Imagine how confused the Japanese audiences must have been upon witnessing the 100 minute cut...

Kurosawa's film is interesting, because it differs from anything else that he directed. Partly this comes in the form of negative things. Both the source material and the editing-history make this an unusually unsure film for Kurosawa. The novel doesn't have much actually happening, which is very unlike your typical Kurosawa narratives, that are straight-forward.

Yet the best things in this adaptation are really great. Kurosawa's black and white depiction of winter in Sapporo is stunningly beautiful and helps to capture the emotional coldness of the narrative. The casting is also mostly excellent, once you get used to the fact that General Epanchin's wife is now the grandmother from Tokyo Story (1953). Hara Setsuko has been cast against type as the femme fatale, and this insane contrast serves to keep the film constantly interesting when she is onscreen. Hara is a movie star on the same level with Greta Garbo, and offers magnificent close-ups throughout the film. Mifune's rough temper is also perfect for the role of Rogozhin, and he does great job. Kuga Yoshiko also gives a good performance.

The only one, about whom I have reservations, is Mori Masayuki as the lead character, Prince Myshkin in the novel. In all his versatility, Mori is one of my favorite actors from Japan, but in this version the lead character has been written to be too undetermined. Myshkin as a character is kind, but also verbally talented, and therefore the way Kurosawa has directed Mori to look at everything like a confused puppy didn't really work for me.

Because I am not a great fan of the novel, it is difficult for me to say, what should have been added to make this a better film. It is clear that the first meeting of Mifune and Mori in the beginning has been drastically edited, and other introductions, too, seem to have been cut, making the film more confusing. It is interesting to wonder, if Shochiku had allowed Kurosawa to release the four-hour cut, had he done the film AFTER Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954)...

Although severely mutilated, this film still distillates the genius of Kurosawa, unfortunately the artistic decisions are still made by the people who have the money, not by the people who have the talent.

For the people who have read Dostoievski's "The Idiot", I think this film will be an amazing experience. For the rest the movie probably won't be very clear, because the studio edited off over an hour of footage, which obviously crippled the movie.

That was the luck which Kurosawa's "The Idiot" ran. And many of other films too.

Regards

This is a rather meandering tale which is hard to follow without a familiarity with the Dostoevsky novel. Armed with some understanding of the novel, this becomes an interesting translation. It's amazing to watch Kurosawa take its Russian roots and transfer it to Japanese culture. All in all, it's far from being one of his best. But like almost all of his work, it has moments which are fascinating. I would recommend it only to someone who is familiar with the novel or is trying to plow their way through it.

Masayuki Mori, the slain husband from Roshomon, is fantastic as Kameda, a pure and simple, yet insightful, man who remains mentally frail after recovering from a breakdown. The film chronicles his relationships with two very different women, both in love with him, and with the volatile and violent Akama, a perfect part for Toshiro Mifune. Prior to reading the novel, I found the plot disjointed and difficult to follow. I think this film is best appreciated as a series of set pieces. The interaction among the players in each scene is completely absorbing as Kameda, through his passivity and selflessness, elicits a whole range of emotions from the rest of the cast. Minoru Chiaki, the woodchopper samurai from Seven Samurai, has a small but absolutely riveting role.

The 2003 Russian miniseries by Vladimire Bortko, at nearly 10 hours, captures far more of Dostoyevski's novel than does this film. However, somehow, Kurosawa has been able to capture the essence of the novel. It's a shame that over an hour was cut from the film and is now lost.

Setsuko Hara is tremendous as the "Natassya" character from the novel and Chieko Higashiyama as the "Lizaveta" character. Both are regulars from Ozu films but its unusual to find them together in Kurosawa.

If you have read the novel, you won't have any trouble following the story, even though it has been transposed from czarist Russia to Post-WW II Japan. If you don't know the story, just enjoy the incredible acting and direction of Kurosawa.

"To be or not to be, that's the question."

And that's the central question that encompasses many aspects of film-making. We gather that it's all about what is and what is not, what seems and what reality is, if it can be taken for granted... but that the iconic question was raised by the appearance of a spectrum speaks another truth about cinema: it's about death as much as it's about life.

It's about death in the sense that we're watching a present that is no more and the older a film gets, the fuller of ghosts the screen is. It's also about death because fiction isn't reality in the first place. We learn about life through a ghostly present called fiction, or a living death in motion, that's the first truth. And like life, "The Idiot" opens with a scream, a seminal scream tracing the invisible frontier between life and death. It's upon that screaming truth that "The Idiot" opens in an overcrowded train where passengers are sleeping.

Kameda (Masayuki Mori) shares with Akama (Toshiro Mifune) the nightmare he just had, a dream-like flashback of the execution from which he barely escaped. After that episode where he literally saw the ghost of death coming to seize him, he made a tacit pact with destiny: anything carrying life would be instantly precious, from the dog he threw stones at as a kid to any human being, everyone was worthy of his goodness. But because of the shell shock and the war-trauma, Kameda spent time in an asylum, and his dementia was translated into an uglier word: idiot, a verbal leitmotif with the same resonance as 'stupid' in "Forrest Gump".

Kurosawa adapted Dostoyevsky's famous novel changing its Imperial Russian setting to post-war Japan. He was perhaps one of his biggest fans, considering him the most truthful author when it came to paint humanity. And indeed, you can see another truth in Kameda's behavior: he's a good person, not candid or naïve, but good because he learned to fear death, it's the awareness of his mortality that forged his goodness. Goodness is at the core of being human, because what defines our condition is death and what should define it is being good. This good/dead duality turns Makeda into a zombie-figure, a ghost sleepwalking among humans.

Normal people are too stubbornly attached to life to realize that they miss its very point. And it's only until they look at themselves through Kameda's eyes, played with quiet intensity by Mori that they're too disarmed to toy with feelings. I never really liked staring at people in the eyes because I found it like obscenely undressing them. And it's true that the titular idiot while not doing anything except reading, speaking or being present, allow these people to unmask their real selves. In a way, he is like a living metaphor of the camera, the threshold between the living and the seeming, a trigger to people's honesty.

I mentioned Forrest Gump, but the idiot can be also compared to Peter Sellers in "Being There" where his candidness was mistaken for profundity. In the case of Kameda, there is a genuine perceptiveness in his eyes, capable to see beyond the barriers of reputation or social bearings, but that capability backfires at him because you just can't idealize everyone without hurting some. Kurosawa's movies have always been about people who could 'look' but being a passive observer was only one step before action, there was no meaningless look. In "The Idiot", looking is active by essence and meaningful by necessity, not just for the observer.

Indeed, it all starts with Akama showing a picture of Taeko (Setsuko Hara) a woman he's literally buying from a "benefactor" who's literally auctioning her, Kayama played by the baby-faced Minoru Chiaki is also interested to buy her for a lesser dowry. When Kameda sees the picture of Taeko, it's not just love but truth at first sight, he can't see the whole thing, until a birthday party where he reveals with a sharp candor the amount of humanity he can read in Taeko, connecting it to the same fearful look he saw in a man who was executed. Taeko is so fascinated by the man she asks him if she should marry Kayama.

Later in the film, the triangular love has evolved, the rivalry isn't between Akama and Makeda but between Taeko and Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga) the daughter of Kameda's host played by Takashi Shimura. The two women love the same man, a situation that is likely to have two collateral damages and speaks another truth about life: the intentions no matter how good they are carry inevitable bad effects and vice versa. And Makeda's ambiguous relationship with Akama (Mifune has rarely been as intense... and sexy) reminds of their previous confrontation in "Rashomon", two men with two versions of the same story, each one living in his own fantasy or dream-like vision of life, each one driven mad because of truth.

Dreams or alternate realities are often present in Kurosawa's oeuvre, maybe to better preserve us from the painful truth as if goodness was too unbearable. The film is set in a cold wintery town, covered by snow, where people are too struck by coldness to act naturally, or during a carnival or a fancy reception where everyone plays a role and only one person stays the same, the man without a personality, a persona, a mask. He's the man who affect personalities, allowing them to transcend their condition, encouraging a woman with a reputation to emancipate herself, a crook to apologize and the weakly Mayaka to renounce money.

Every scene is staged with an opposition between passive liveliness and active inertia, reminding of that transcendent power of the camera, a frontier between life and death, dream and reality. The film speaks so many truths (a word I used a lot) maybe at the risk of being overlong, but it carries an irresistible poetry of its own.